New York-based Pakistani American visual artist Shahzia Sikander focuses on classical Indo-Persian miniature painting. Known for her contemporary subject matter, she has infused the ancient practice with new forms of media. Her work encompasses painting, video, animation, mural, installation, and performance, among other disciplines.
Like 3D artist Moreshin Allahyari, Sikander’s work serves as commentary on today’s world. She explores feminist, Muslim, American, and queer perspectives.
“My work breaches all sorts of binaries and boundaries around cultural representations and female iconographies,” Sikander told Studio International.
An international artist, Sikander has presented solo exhibitions at arts and cultural institutions across the globe. Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art are among the many to have showcased her artwork.
Throughout her over 30-year career, Sikander has won innumerable awards and grants for her craft. She is a 2006 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” fellowship for outstanding creative work in 2-D Visual Art. In 2022, she won the Fukuoka Prize for contributions to preserving and continuing Asian art and culture.
Contemporary miniature artist Shahzia Sikander
Sikander completed her BFA in Miniature Painting from the National College of Art in Lahore in 1991. There, she learned the traditional techniques of the style while experimenting with contemporary context.
“When I went to the National College of Arts in Lahore in 1987, traditional miniature painting was stigmatised as kitsch and derivative,” she recalled. “‘Miniature,’ a colonial term, encompasses premodern Central and South Asian manuscript painting. There were barely any students studying it. My interest in premodern manuscripts was sparked in response to that largely dismissive attitude, as well as by a collective lack of deep cultural knowledge about the genre.”
Sikander’s undergraduate thesis, The Scroll (1989-90), is a take on the narrative art form that ultimately launched her career. Traditional miniature paintings depicted scenes from myth and sacred texts on a notebook-sized paper. Sikander, retaining the style and intimate level of detail, painted five feet of scenes inspired by her childhood home.
“At that time, in the late 80s, [my thesis] sort of broke open the mold for creating a contemporary take on a very predominantly historical or traditional engagement with that genre,” Sikander told The Modern Art Notes Podcast.
Following the completion of her BFA, Sikander moved to the US to continue her education. In 1995, she earned her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. She then went on to study with the Glassell School of Art’s CORE Program at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
In June 2021 Extraordinary Realities premiered at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum. The exhibition is a survey of works from Sikander’s first 15 years as a professional artist. The artwork ranged from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, when Sikander was primarily a student.
Shahzia Sikander’s ties to Pakistan
Sikander hails from Pakistan, where she was born in 1969. Visual art first captivated her at a young age.
“Art, for me, was always very natural,” she told Equality Now. “I was always drawing as a child. It was something that came more effortlessly to me because I was fairly introverted. I think drawing functioned as a bridge for all those awkward moments when I was too shy to speak up.”
The social conditions of her upbringing shaped the artist to be who she is today.
“I grew up in the 1980s in Pakistan when there was a military dictatorship,” said Sikander. “It was a time of diminishing women’s and human rights…And at that time I did an internship at…a women’s resource publication center and I worked as a graphic designer there when I was in high school. And one of the leading artists there encouraged me to apply to the National College of Arts.”
“Then once I was [there] I was very interested in this idea of who gets to determine what is tradition. It is often written from the perspective of Western curators and historians. So this led me to work closely with miniatures and that is where the journey began.”
Though she is now based in New York, Sikander maintains close ties with her home country.
“I travel back and forth a lot,” she explained. “But broadly, as a Pakistani American, or as a transnational artist, I have been part of artistic movements in both Pakistan and America. And I have an interest in the colonial histories, around migration, and around the history of resources and commodities so my work is constantly evolving and growing but the core concerns are not limited to geography.”
Shahzia Sikander experiments with Sculpture, Film
Over time, Sikander has expanded the miniature painting tradition by using non-traditional and contemporary forms of media. For example, Sikander created her first animation, SpiNN, in 2003. In 2016 she also created the 10-minute video animation Disruption as Rapture. The animation brings to life a South-Central Indian illuminated manuscript from the 18th century. In 2019 the work premiered as a solo exhibition at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in North Carolina.
“It’s important that the strength of the drawing is not lost, and that the drawing guides the animation,” Sikander told The Brooklyn Rail. “You can’t compete with the virtuosity of these painted manuscripts, and you don’t want the work to be subservient to a software.”
More recently, Sikander is also experimenting with sculpture as a medium. Promiscuous Intimacies (2020) is inspired her earlier drawing Intimacy (2001).
“In 2017, I had the opportunity to be part of the New York City Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers,” explained Sikander. “Hearing differing public opinion, historical reckoning and tensions over historical representations during that process gave me the idea of translating a painting into a sculpture to see what would transpire.”
“The work refers to a truncated temple sculpture of an Indian celestial dancer…The dancer flirtatiously entwines with a figure drawn from the Italian mannerist painting…I was pushing back at the polarising east-west binary while highlighting art history’s classicism and ethnocentric reactions to Indian art.”
“When I create contemporary miniatures in which women resist simplistic categorizations, I am responding to the difficulty of finding feminist representations of brown South Asians in contemporary culture,” Sikander wrote for the New York Times.
